Former Georgia football star David Pollack is sending out a clear warning about the Texas Longhorns, and he isn’t holding anything back. While most of the sports world is busy hyping up Texas as a surefire national championship contender, Pollack is looking past the glitz and glamour. According to him, there may be a problem that doesn’t show up on the depth chart: the energy inside the program.

Pollack’s comments came after watching a video of head coach Steve Sarkisian trying to fire up his team in the locker room. Sarkisian gave a whole speech built around the theme of “prove us right,” but it completely missed the mark for Pollack and his co-host Brent Rollins.

“Here’s my team. Prove us right. We have assembled an unbelievable roster. We’ve got great schemes. We’ve got all the things in place to be a tremendous football team. Prove us right. There’s so much outside noise outside of this building, right? And everybody wants to say what’s wrong with Texas. Shift that narrative away from what the outside noise is, and I want to focus on what we’re talking about!” Sarkisian said.

Pollack had to stop the video midway. The former linebacker, who was famous for playing with a wild amount of energy on the field, admitted on his See Ball Get Ball Podcast that the speech was so flat and boring that he almost fell asleep just watching it.

“Sark is (from) California. You have to be you, and you have to do your personality. And players take on the personality of your coach. I almost fell asleep as opposed to running through a wall,” Pollack said.

For a team with championship expectations, that kind of low-energy vibe is a tough look. In Pollack’s eyes, if the head coach isn’t going to be the aggressive “dog that bites,” you absolutely have to bring someone into the building who will.

The co-host Rollins admitted that watching the locker room video completely changed how he views the Longhorns moving forward. In fact, he confessed that if he had seen that footage beforehand, he actually would have changed his preseason pick for the Texas team.

Even though every single word Sarkisian said, such as ‘we assemble great team’ and ‘there’s so much outside noise,’ was factually true, the vibe of the message just did not sit right with him at all.

Truth be told, the boring speech is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the red flags Pollack is spotting. The biggest headline on the field centers around the offense and the most famous backup-turned-starter in the country, Arch Manning. Because Manning was limited in spring practice while recovering from minor foot surgery, Pollack noted that the young quarterback is looking a bit rusty. During the second fall scrimmage, Sarkisian, too, said the offense looked too sloppy, while Manning was somewhat inefficient.

That’s a problem when you realize they have a brutal, high-stakes showdown against the Ohio State Buckeyes waiting for them in Week 2.

On top of a clunky offense, the Longhorns are also dealing with some sudden locker room drama that has shaken up their roster depth. Just days before the season kicked off, veteran linebacker Ty’Anthony Smith was abruptly kicked off the team for “conduct detrimental to the team”.

Then, the father of freshman cornerback Hayward Howard Jr. went on a wild social media rant, blasting the football program and threatening to “expose” everything going on behind closed doors. Even though the tweet was quickly deleted, publicly attacking the coaching staff is a terrible sign.

When you add up a sleepy locker room speech, a rusty offense, sudden player dismissals, and angry parents, it’s clear the Longhorns are dealing with a fragile ecosystem. With Texas among the programs believed to be spending more than $40 million on its 2026 roster, the pressure to win a national championship right now is through the roof.